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June 19, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:46
2410 The Business of Harming Evil
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So, with regards to my skepticism towards political action, I thought that it would be worthwhile talking, and hopefully not too boringly, about my history in the business world.
So, I started my first professional gig was as a COBOL programmer at On a trading floor, a stock trading floor, and I started in COBOL 74.
While I was there, we upgraded to COBOL 85.
I was in charge of preparing all the programs for COBOL 85, and I wrote a number of programs as well, which was very interesting.
I'd never used COBOL before I went, but a language is a language is a language.
I think COBOL was like my seventh computer language, so it's not too hard to figure that stuff out once you have been down that road a few times before.
And then, during that time, I began working on the side with my brother to build an environmental management information system, which is really designed to help people to track environmental issues that may be occurring or may occur in their organization and to store the results of what are called phase one audits,
where you just go and get someone to see if there are going to be any environmental issues, where you do a A search of the history of the property and you do soil samples and you check for above ground and underground storage tanks or anything that may have leaked or be residual so that When you transfer the land, you have some sort of sense of what liabilities you may be exposed to in the transfer of the land.
And did a whole bunch of other stuff and did reports and all that.
Anyway, so basically that was the...
And then we expanded that later on to deal with SARA reporting, which is in the U.S. You have to tell the government how many...
Like what bad stuff has gone out to the air or the groundwater.
And the ground.
And so we tracked all of that stuff.
And it's fairly complicated because, you know, stuff breaks and you have bypasses and downtime and schedule repairs, maintenance, all that.
So you have to really work hard to make sure you get the right numbers.
And it's quite complicated.
And I was sort of in charge of that.
Now, I was the chief technical officer, which meant that I had a team of programmers and testers and all that kind of stuff.
People who wrote the documentation and so on.
Technical writers.
Oh yes, I guess it's been a while.
And I guess we had about 35 people at the height of the company.
About, I think, 15 or 20 of them worked for me.
I was mostly focused on research and development.
And so, I mean, I can talk a good talk, so I would be the guy who would fly out and give presentations or at least support the salespeople in their presentations.
I have a fairly good way of transmogrifying tech talk to marketing talk without everyone getting all drooly and googly-eyed.
So...
So that was sort of my job, and then we sold the company, and then I stayed on for a while, the company got sold again, and I decided to not...
So I was there!
And gosh, I guess...
Oh, it was a long time.
Ten years?
Anyway, it was quite a while, and...
One of the things that I learned, and it's not something that you really learn that much as an employee.
As an employee, you're focused on your salary.
And it doesn't mean you don't care about the company as a whole.
But as an employee, you really are focused on your salary.
And you don't really focus on the health of the company as a whole unless you're very high up.
I'm sort of talking about sort of middle management and so on.
And, you know, more senior management, you're focusing on your productivity of your department and so on.
And then the CEOs, the board, are focusing on the productivity of the company as a whole.
And as an employee, I focused on my salary and, you know, whether I was going to get a bonus and that.
And it's just this rational focus is where your resources are coming from.
And it's what you can affect and it's what you can control.
So that's what you do.
Am I going to meet this deadline?
Am I going to get this bonus?
Am I going to get that?
Am I going to get that promotion, if that's what I want?
And what happens is people's ambitions, when they can't go up anymore, due to limitations in the company or within themselves, or their education, or maybe even their confidence, their energies start to go horizontal towards politics, and that's all bad.
People who get stalled become quite toxic, I think, in some ways.
So, during the...
In the course of my business career, I mean, I was responsible for millions and millions of dollars of investment in R&D, and these R&D projects were fairly lengthy.
And the R&D was basically around features and platform.
So we started off in 16-bit Windows, and at the end of what we were doing, we still had a Windows GUI. But we had a web interface.
And I was pretty funky stuff for the day, I tell you.
I mean, we ran a program.
I wrote a program called the Database Builder, wherein you'd say, you know, here are the fields, here's the drop-downs, here's the forms, here's everything that I want.
And the Database Builder would build the forms for you, and then you would adjust the controls as needed.
And then it would also scan the forms and create web coordinates to build a web interface automatically with All the navigation, all the drop-downs, add, edit, delete buttons, and all that kind of stuff.
And it was very sophisticated, and it was multilingual, so both the Windows GUI and the web form could take.
And because we have English and French up here in Canada, I did a system for Mandarin as well.
So it was pretty funky stuff.
I mean, it really was a very dynamic and powerful system because we did field customizations for clients.
And so that was a very important part of the R&D that I was doing was to try and make sure that we had A web interface.
And it didn't have all the funky stuff that the GUI interface had, but we had an automatically generated web interface that didn't need a whole lot of testing for people to access when they were away from the GUI. Because, you know, people wanted it on site and so on.
So, I was a coder the whole way through.
I never sort of lost track of that.
That was fairly important stuff to go on.
So, one of the things that was...
Really important, and this was not something that came naturally to me.
I had to have this hammered into me over a while.
I can't remember how long, but sometimes it felt like quite a while.
Which was to continually remember and focus on the dollar value of what I was building.
Right?
Because there's cool stuff you can build in technology.
The question is, is it going to raise the price or profit of your system.
A customer is going to be willing to pay more or will it shorten their buying decision cycle?
Does it differentiate us positively and productively from our competitors and all that kind of cool stuff?
And so you had to go talk to the clients a lot and say, well, how are you using the software?
What do you like?
What do you not like?
All that kind of stuff.
So you can figure out.
Because software tends to get progressively more kludgy, right?
So you almost never take features away.
You just pile feature on feature on feature.
And a lot of stuff.
But you still have to test everything.
You still have to maintain everything.
You still have to upgrade everything.
And if you're building a web interface, you still have to build a web interface.
So there may be aspects of the software that are barely used or people don't even know about.
So that was something that was really quite an interesting challenge, which was to balance what I was building with the profitability of the company as a whole.
And since this was our product, the department was the company.
And focusing on that was hard because it's like two different mindsets, right?
One is cool, play, tech, fun, code, wow.
And the other is, what is the dollar value?
What is the projected dollar value of what I'm doing?
And so, I would have to produce all of these big reports or technology plans, basically.
And the technology plans would have to have justifications.
Like, you couldn't just say, well, we need X because it's cool and I like it.
I mean, it'd have to be, you know, has a customer requested it?
Do...
What is the anticipated...
Now, if we add this feature, I mean, you couldn't do this for every feature, but for large chunks of the software, you'd say, well, how is this going to shorten the sales cycle, or how is this going to increase the dollar value of what we can sell?
Now, to be fair, the software, the first one we sold was $5,000, and the last one was over a million.
So, yes, what I did put in quite a bit of value.
Into the software.
It wasn't all inflation, but what I did create, and when I say I, I mean, I was the principal architect, and of course I didn't do all the coding, you know, a whole bunch of coders, but what I built did have value, but that didn't happen accidentally.
Like, I didn't just build stuff and, you know, build it and they will come.
That's just silly, right?
But...
Focusing on the dollar value and also you have to put your reputation, your own salaries on the line based on...
What it is that you are saying is going to happen.
So if you say, well, you know, here's the...
And also, you have to also justify why do anything, right?
Why not just continue doing the same thing?
And so when I wrote this database builder, it took, I think, two, two and a half months, and it built the first round of the software for us, and it also...
We used it at the end to double-check that, you know, every field was mapped to the right field in the database, and all of the, you know, we had, you know, double-click brings up a calendar or a calculator, and I had to make sure all of that code was there.
And this was all done automatically, and we used to spend a lot of time, thousands of fields, double-check, you know, but double-check that the double-click works with the calendars and the calculators and so on.
And we were one of the first companies to do automatic query by form, which is, you know, you click a button and you type into the form what you want to see in the underlying form.
But all of this became automated to the point where we didn't have to check it anymore.
So all of the standardized code...
I had code that sniffed out all of the standardized code to make sure the database worked from a functional standpoint, and we didn't have to check that stuff anymore.
That saved us hundreds of hours per system that we were delivering, and of course increased the reliability of that.
So to make that case, okay, so here's what we pay the QA guys.
And here's the anticipated savings by building this database builder and checker.
And so here's how much we're going to spend to build it, and here's how much we're going to save, and here's how much I expect reliability to improve.
And I mean, it's down to the dollar.
You have to put these guesses out.
And then you have to track it and check it.
Actually, you ended up saving even more than I was anticipating, and the quality was very high.
So all of that was really important.
And this level of skepticism, which is necessary to bring to bear on any system that you're building, is really, really important.
Resources are incredibly scarce, particularly in a smaller company.
Resources are incredibly scarce, and the opportunity costs are It's essential to understand, right?
So if I say, well, I'm going to go off and do this database work, then I'm less available to go and do presentations.
And I just had to push back on that because people are like, yeah, but you'll still be available to do presentations.
It's like, well, yes, but if I have this deadline, because I say it's going to take, I think, two and a half months, if I have this deadline, then I'm not going to be as available or I have to extend the deadline.
I mean, I've factored in some sales presentations, but if I do more, I will have to extend the deadline.
I didn't want to be that kind of person who just piles something else on, man.
So, for me, this was all quite an education.
And in hindsight, it really makes sense.
And I've had to replicate this lesson...
To a whole bunch of other people.
I mean, I remember Bill Gates, who was talking about this when he was trying to get mosquito nets out to Africa, you know, and they just said, hey, you know, give us a bunch of money, we'll buy a bunch of nets and hand them out.
And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not how it works in business.
That's not how it works.
I give you money, and you have to send me reports, and you have to send me verification that these are all out, it's all been done, and then you have to measure the effectiveness of what's been done, and you have to try and figure out if there's any better way to do whatever it is that's being done, and, you know, we have to be in a real reporting detailed relationship.
And this, of course, was quite a shock to a lot of the hippy-dippy people.
Non-governmental organizations who are used to just getting a check and writing a report saying things went really well.
But that doesn't cut it in the business world.
In the business world, you have to measure almost everything that you're doing and check that it is pursuing maximum profit and productivity.
And whatever you can do that saves a company money repetitively is almost always more important than something which saves a company money just once.
So, all of these aspects of years and years of boring, grueling, but incredibly valuable education in the business world is something that And I've mentioned it in a couple of speeches, but I did want to go into it in more detail.
It's something that I bring to the project called Not Fix the Database, but Fix the World.
Not Fix the Database, but Fix the World.
Much more important.
And so the twin sort of edifices of the libertarian approach to fixing the world, which is Education and politics, right?
Political action and education, these are the two things which will fix the world.
I don't view those as, I don't take those for granted, because the whole point, and it's funny, you know, because people in the free market or people who like the free market always talk about the creative destruction of the free market, right?
And it's true.
The free market is a huge amount of creative destruction.
And the creation, the creative stuff is, well, we've got fantastic new solutions to age-old problems, and the destruction is, and I don't care about those age-old problems, right?
So, You know, why do we have cars?
Because some people said, well, horses stink.
Like, literally.
I'm tired of shoveling horse crap out of the streets all the time, and so we can try and get something else.
You know, why do we have cell phones?
Because people said being in contact with people when you're on the road is a good thing.
So why do we have smartphones?
Because, because, because, right?
And you can't go and find a rotary dial letting more acceptors It could be an extension to your iPod or your iPhone.
So, the essence of the free market is extreme skepticism or just a complete ignoring of all prior solutions.
Now, the funny thing about libertarianism is that, and I've been asking this question for years, I've not actually seen a place or an area or an argument where education and politics has ever been shown to work.
And that, to me, is interesting, right?
Because things which involve the government, you don't get that creative destruction, right?
I think it's called upwardly sticky.
It expands and it just gets stuck in a rut.
As I pointed out numerous times, the government solution to education was picked up from the single room A farmhouse school where you had a bunch of kids in rows looking at a teacher scratching away on a whiteboard, a blackboard, and now it's a whiteboard.
That's the big difference.
But it's the same model, basically.
Everything else has changed in the whole world.
We've gone to the moon and back.
We can fly all around the world.
We can talk from mountaintops to bath escapes, but still we have 20, 30, 40 kids in a room and a teacher scratching away on a board.
So things just get really, really sticky.
I get really stuck.
And the same thing has happened.
You just have these answers called politics and education.
And this is what people have tried literally for thousands of years.
Politics was tried by Plato.
Plato tried getting involved in politics in Syracuse 2,500 odd years ago.
And he got betrayed, trapped, sold into slavery, barely made it out with his life.
So, okay, things are better in that we don't get sold into slavery anymore, but still, getting involved in politics is entering into a government program.
Politics is a government program, right?
And why we would expect any greater benefits from entering into a government program called politics than any other government program is...
Well, it's hard to conceive how we could imagine that, but that's what people...
Believe and think and expect.
And the other thing, too, is that things that continue to be advocated tend to continue to be advocated by people who are personally benefiting from that, right?
So, you know, the teachers' unions, of course, say we need more teachers with higher pay.
And because they get more union dues, right?
And the teachers say, you know, well, I need my summers off and this and that and the other because they like their summers off.
And bureaucracies say, well, we need more people in my bureaucracy.
I need more people in my fiefdom or my kingdom, all of these things, right?
Because they benefit from that.
Now, if you look at politics, people, like in the libertarian world, people benefit from politics, right?
I mean, they get money.
I know it's not a huge amount of money, but you get money.
You get donations.
You get to meet with people.
You get to write policies.
All the wonky stuff that I think we all love to do.
I know I do.
And as far as academia, of course, people get to make speeches and pass motions and have bang-gabbles and have minutes.
All that kind of fun stuff.
And it's enjoyable.
Now, as far as education goes, well, I mean, the life of a tenured professor is, I mean, it's a life of royalty.
It's a life of staggering luxury.
You know, I mean, you work a couple of hours a week, you read books, you write papers, you get sabbaticals, you get long summers off, and you get people who you have power over.
You have power over students.
Because you are in the gig of dispensing grades, of controlling people's access to moving on or even staying in the academic system.
And so you have lots of power, lots of power over people.
I mean, good lord, I have no power over my listeners at all, because I'm not...
Philosophy is probably going to make their life, at least in the short to medium run, a lot more difficult than it is easy.
I get this regular wave of letters from, man, I hate philosophy.
Oh, man, it's ruining my life.
To, oh, wow, this is great.
It takes a while.
But it's like any improvement.
And the more fundamental the improvement, the harder it is at the beginning, usually, and the greater the benefits at the end.
But the life of a tenured professor is...
You know, about as great.
I mean, just listen to Tyler Cowen.
I mean, talk about how much he loves going to art galleries and how well certain galleries are hung.
He was on EconTalk talking about this a couple of years ago, and I was just like, oh, man.
I mean, I was just like, that's a pretty sweet life, man.
And then I went to this conference.
I think it was in their Barbados.
Yeah.
It's like, oh man, you people are just royalty, right?
But that's because they have government-protected contracts, right?
They have unions, they have a great gig.
So it's not too surprising that people think that education is the way to go, because those people get into that education stuff, and they have a pretty delightfully sweet, tasty time with it.
You can't get fired.
You have power over people, which a lot of people really love.
And let's not pretend that economists or even free market economists or political science professors don't like that power over others.
I mean, it would actually, it would kind of repulse me.
Because philosophy is not a, to me, philosophy is not a passing off or failing thing.
I just don't see it.
It's a process.
It's just a process.
It's a continual process and sometimes you do better and sometimes you do worse.
Sometimes you're in integrity and sometimes you're not.
Particularly when you're coming out of the anti-philosophical world that we all live in, You know, where we're trying to do virtue while everybody's screaming confusion in our ear.
You know, if you're doing a math test of someone and you've got, you know, three coked up Japanese people screaming random numbers into their ear, you know, when do they pass?
When do they fail?
Well, that's a complicated question and it depends and so on, right?
But recognizing the cross-currents or the counter-currents of what is occurring is really important.
So, I don't know.
You know, if someone's trying to swim up a waterfall while people belt them with golf balls, you know, do you pass or do you fail them?
I don't know.
I mean, pass them just for showing up and giving it a try.
Philosophy is much more important than anything like that.
So, there's so many countercurrents to what it is that we're doing, you know, socially, politically, romantically, that...
It's hard to, I don't know, it's just hard for me to think of a sort of passing and failing thing.
But I mean, you know, I'm sure in economics, if you know whether you can correctly explain the Austrian business cycle and so on, sure.
Because it's important to know and to retest it on that knowledge, that makes sense to me.
But it's not something that I would like to give a pass or a fail on.
The other thing, too, is like the moment you give a pass or fail, what people do is they...
They strenuously apply themselves to that particular moment, right?
But philosophy...
And then, you know, let's say I did a pass or fail grade for somebody's understanding of UPB. I mean, first of all, I'd have to fail myself sometimes.
I still occasionally make a mistake when I'm explaining it.
It doesn't matter right now, but I still will occasionally make a mistake in explaining it.
Go back and correct myself.
I've done that on shows.
But...
Somebody will then study the hell out of UPB and learn a whole bunch of rote answers, and then they'll answer those questions correctly and write something correctly.
But then that great contraction relaxes and the knowledge scatters, right?
I mean, they've actually found that people who've never studied economics do better on economics tests a year or two after than people who've taken a course in economics.
Because people, they just, they cram it all into the, we've all done this, right?
You cram all that knowledge into your head.
You memorize, you stuff everything into short-term memory, you blarp it out, and then you're like, hey, I've got to pass, and therefore it's done.
Therefore the process is done, right?
And that is so the opposite of what UPB is.
UPB is universally preferable behavior.
It's a way of evaluating our own and others' thoughts, positions, and actions.
But in a way that is a continual process, and you should pursue a UPB for the continual improvements it's going to give you in integrity.
I mean, it's not just something you say, oh, I know it, and I passed it.
So then what?
What do you do after you've achieved the grade?
Well, I remember doing a paper on the Crimean War in university.
I was thinking about this just when I was sort of getting ready for this podcast.
I was thinking, what the hell did I even write about?
It's like a 15-page paper on the Crimean War.
I can't, for the life of you, tell me what on earth I wrote about.
I mean, it's a while ago.
I can tell you about my thesis, because I really care about that, and that was part of a foundational thing for me.
But yeah, I just...
Can't remember for the life of me.
I mean, that's a good chunk of what goes on for me, went on for me in college, at least up until the master's level.
It's like I just write this stuff, blurp it out, a whole course in psychology.
I remember sitting in the common room before the exam and going through my textbook with all the definitions and all this, that, and the other, and I couldn't tell you anything.
I mean, I probably could tell you a few just because I've read a lot of books on psych ever since, but...
I mean, I just...
You squeeze it all into your brain, you blurp it out on the page, and then you...
You move on, and you, you know, it's like, well, now that knowledge has achieved its purpose.
I got the grade.
And so I'm done with that knowledge.
That's very sad.
It's not the purpose of knowledge.
So the moment you have...
An exterior goal or standard to achieve, we inevitably, you know, like you get to the finish line, you stop running.
You escape the line, you stop running.
Once there's a goal to what it is you do, when you achieve that goal, your energy deflates.
Of course it does.
I mean, imagine if you saw in the Olympics, you know, Guy just keeps running over imaginary hurdles at the end of his hurdle race.
I mean, that would just be...
It would look mental.
It's like, dude, there are no more hurdles and you've finished, so stop running.
That's what they all do.
Get to the edge of the mat, you stop doing your flips, right?
And so the problem with the external standards is that your energy deflates.
Now, of course, your energy won't deflate if there's still an external standard.
So if you say, well, I've got this grade, now I need the next grade because I want to get to be a tenured professor or whatever.
Well, that's very different.
That's very different.
But then your energy will...
Well, now, I should say that if you, you know, with all due respect to the academics, particularly libertarian academics, I mean, you'll still keep doing what you're doing if you really sort of take delight in publishing and all that kind of stuff.
But that, again, is a personal pleasure that you take in writing and publishing.
So, and it's not under me, you can't take your personal pleasure, but if that's mixed in with the idea that I'm changing the world, then that's very much mistaken, right?
And as I pointed out many times before, free market academics, according to their own philosophy, they should leave academia and do something like what I'm doing, which is, you know, in the free market, without extrinsic rewards, and to be entirely customer-driven, because they say voluntarism is quality, right?
And the moment you have a cartel, the moment you're part of a monopoly, then your quality goes down and your value goes down and all that.
So my basic argument is that even if you have a PhD in free market economics, you still can't give up your government benefits.
And that's interesting.
Again, just looking empirically, and the other thing that's the case as well with sort of the twin gods of political action and libertarian education is that they've created these kinds of grooves in people's brains which are really problematic.
So, for instance, when people say, well, I'm, you know, they read their Rand or their Rothbard or their Hayek or their Mises or, you know, their Lou Rockwell or whatever, they read this stuff, or me.
I'm like, wow, I really want to go and do things, right?
So then, it's like you're just a train.
You get slotted onto these twin tracks called education and politics.
Education about libertarianism and politics.
So, if I educate people about libertarian theory and I support libertarian-sounding politicians, that's the best and the only thing that really can be done to achieve what we want and free the world.
And it's like a train track.
This is what we do.
And...
That's as limited and, I think, as destructive fundamentally as, well, what do we do with the poor?
Well, we have a welfare state.
Well, the government, well, it's like there's this need to, what do we do about disasters?
Well, we have disaster assistance from the government.
What do we do about education?
Government schools.
It's just these train tracks that you get slotted onto, and then, well, that's, gosh, that's what you do.
I mean, to even think of anything else, for most people, is insane.
And we know this as libertarians.
We should privatize schools, privatize charities, and so on.
People are like, it's insane.
If we have a problem, we go to the government.
Global warming, what do we do?
Go to the government.
Carbon tax emissions and credits and laws, regulations, control.
That's what we do.
When you have a problem, go to the government.
Free the world.
Go to education about libertarian theory and political action.
Well, the creative destruction that we all worship should have us re-evaluate those things.
Of course it should.
Even if they were successful, they should be re-evaluated.
Right?
Even if they had been successful.
Because the whole point of creative destruction, of really thinking outside the box...
Is to recognize that the best we're doing might not be the best we can do.
So even if we were shrinking the state and even if we were expanding liberties and even if we were stabilizing the currencies and even if we were privatizing things left, right and center, we still would not know for sure that we were doing the very best that we could.
And so even if you have a profitable company, Could it be more profitable?
Could we be doing better?
I mean, this is how you get the gold, right?
The guy is the fastest in his high school, then he becomes the fastest in his county, in his state, in the country, and maybe even the world.
Because it's like, I'm running really damn...
This is the fastest I've ever run before, but is it the fastest I can possibly, possibly run?
well so even if even if these these two gods were leading us to the promised land we still would be looking left and right to see if we couldn't bypass them and go faster yeah But, of course, the truth and reality is that they're not leading us to the promised land at all.
They're leading us away from the promised land.
Right?
Because we're not shrinking the state.
The state is growing faster and faster and faster.
And if we were able to go back in time to the people who founded this whole thing and say, here's where we are after, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, maybe billions if you count person hours, after maybe billions if you count person hours, after so much investment in the world...
in the world of freedom in attempting to tame the state, We now have a state that is growing exponentially faster every year.
I think they'd say, well, then what we're doing isn't working.
So, jumping the tracks of what is generally transmitted as working by those who benefit from that transmission, people who like politics, people who like academics, that's one way.
Jumping the tracks is hard.
It's really hard.
And the reason people like the tracks is the tracks are safe.
Nobody is really going to get very upset with you for suggesting that welfare is a really great way to help the poor.
Nobody's going to set up hate blogs against you if you say that we need to...
Government education needs to be improved, but it's obviously the right thing to do.
And so, politics and education are so fundamentally harmless to the state because they neuter people.
So, rather than really having an effect on the world...
You are pursuing the futility of libertarian politics and the intellectual masturbation of libertarian educational theory, or theories of educating people on libertarian theory.
So, government has no problem with that because government keeps growing anyway.
So it's people who are afraid of the future, who are afraid of where society is heading.
And frankly, it's pretty fucking terrifying where society is heading.
I think that there is great opportunity for freedom.
I don't think that the powers that be like the tax farmers are going to let the whole thing go down.
I think that they're going to...
Those who've grown up the most helpless and dependent on the state, they're going to get turned on by the ruling classes for sure.
It's going to be brutal.
But they're not, I mean, they're going to liberalize, I think.
They're going to liberalize and they're going to recognize that they need more free market and so on.
But it's going to be, it's going to require a politician who is going to be willing to squander his future for the sake of battling it out in the present.
Not because, like, they'll find someone who's going to do that And who's going to be able to sell it to keep the farm going, right?
Because the twin escape routes of inflation and war are somewhat diminished these days, somewhat less credible these days.
But it is terrifying where things are going.
And in order to avoid...
The fear, people will engage in unproductive actions.
In the real world, they're unproductive.
In fact, they're counterproductive.
But what they do is they allow people to believe that they're doing something and thus allow them to manage their anxiety.
I mean, if you have some disease for which there is no cure, but some quacks come along and tell you do X, Y, and Z, you may in fact do X, Y, and Z. But only because you wish to manage your anxiety about your disease, not because it's going to cure you.
And that's something that is really, really important to understand, that politics and education are ways of managing anxiety by believing that you can do something without occurring the displeasure of evil people.
The way that you know...
That a plan is working against evil is that evil doesn't like it.
That's...
I mean, how do you know if you've done any harm to the dragon?
Well, the dragon wakes up and roars at you.
Right?
I mean, if you're in a different room whacking a pillow, the dragon doesn't even wake up.
And if it does, it probably just laughs.
Yeah, yeah, big brave dragon fighter, right?
But if you're actually going to take on a dragon, then you have to be somebody who's going to do the dragon harm.
Like, imagine some toddler wanders into an Ultimate Fighting Championship match.
I mean, the guy's not going to go full bore on the kid.
He's going to play with him.
He's going to play fight with him, right?
Because the kid is not a challenge, can't do him any harm.
So, they're just, you know, he's going to have some fun.
He's not going to be angry.
He's not going to be focused.
He's not going to be like, do or die, right?
I mean, if you look at Scott Walker, and people burning him in effigy, right?
Because he was taking on a tiny aspect of union power.
Public sector union power.
So, if you're not being burned in effigy, if evil people are not raging against you, then you're not harming the interests of anyone who's evil or corrupt or, I don't know, whatever you want to call it.
So, that's just something really fundamental to understand.
The way you measure the success of virtue is evil's resistance to it.
If you're not harming the interests of any evil people, then you're not doing any good.
How can you expand virtue without harming the interests of evil people?
And so the fact that libertarian academics...
Or libertarian political activists, the fact that they're not hated is because they're harmless.
You know, the cancer that I'm currently battling doesn't like the medicine.
Right?
I mean, if it could speak.
Right?
If I have a glass of water, it doesn't care.
Water doesn't do it any harm, and I guess water in a weird way does it good, because it does all cells good.
But if I go for a walk, it doesn't care.
If I watch TV, it doesn't care.
It doesn't do it any harm.
But if something comes along that shrinks it, that kills off the cells, then it's harmed.
You understand?
It doesn't have any reaction or opinion, so to speak, about anything innocuous that I put in my body.
Now, it will actually favor a medicine that I put in my body that doesn't do it any harm because it knows that I won't be putting another medicine in my body that does it harm.
So let's say that I believe that, you know, stroking a feather over my scalp is going to cure my cancer, then my cancer will actually be in deep approval of me stroking a feather over my scalp because it's not going to cure the cancer.
So the fact that I'm pursuing something That does it no harm and vastly reduces the possibility that I'm going to pursue something that's going to do it harm means that it is much happier about me stroking my head with a feather than if I were going to do something else that was going to actually do it harm.
So there is actually deep approval for the actions of virtue that do not do evil harm Because it means that other actions are not going to be pursued that will do evil harm.
Right?
Evil understands opportunity costs as well as anything.
And if all the virtuous people are out there doing stuff which does evil no harm and are heavily committed and deeply involved in and paid for and paying and with all the sunk...
Costs that keep people on those train tracks.
Evil is like, great!
Great, they're writing books.
Fantastic, that doesn't do me any harm.
Great, they're pursuing academia.
Fantastic, that doesn't do me any harm.
You understand?
Even if you could only...
Like, you can measure the shape of an island by the land or by the water.
If you know where the water stops, you don't even have to see where the land starts.
If you know where the water stops, you've got the shape of the island.
And if you want to look at the success of libertarianism, you can either measure it relative to its goals, but if you want to measure it another way that's actually a whole lot easier, ask yourself, who hates it?
And what is the nature of the people who hate it?
And if you have a project called Slam Evil, but you can't find anyone who hates you, then you're not succeeding.
Because logically, if you're going to slam evil, if you're in a war against evil, then you're either not achieving anything, in which case evil doesn't even care on notice, In fact, they kind of laugh at you, right?
Because you're doing all this stuff that doesn't harm their interests.
And you're sucking other people into this action which does nothing to harm evil.
I don't mean consciously.
I just sort of mean practically, right?
If you're getting all these people to do these things which don't harm the interests of evil people in any way, shape, or form, well...
You're actually in the service of evil.
Now, if you've done something to genuinely harm the interests of evil people, then you either...
So if you say, well, nobody hates me, but I'm really harming the interests of evil people, then you have to put forward the proposition that evil people don't know how to defend their interests.
Then you have to say, well, why doesn't the general population recognize evil people for who they are if evil people don't know how to protect their own interests?
Because the first thing that evil people do to protect their own interests is redefine themselves as good, right?
Clearly.
So you have an unsustainable thesis if you say that I am doing great things against evildoers, but evildoers don't dislike me in any way, shape, or form.
They don't even notice me.
But I'm doing great harm against them.
That's delusional, right?
I mean, that's serving your own selfish need for anxiety management at the expense of virtue.
Because I don't think there's any way to expand virtue without harming the interests of evil people.
That's like saying I can cure cancer without harming any cancer cells.
Funny to think of all the cancer metaphors in the past, eh?
That I've used.
Anyway, I think that's something that is really, really important to understand.
So, and this comes out of just measure, measure, measure.
You know, the whole goal of freedom activism should be to promote virtue and harm vice.
The whole point of weight loss is to promote nutrition and harm fat cells, shrink fat cells, act against the interest of fat cells.
The whole point of cancer is to promote healthy, like anti-cancer, is to promote healthy habits that reduce the possibility of cancer and for those who get it anyway, to harm the cancer cells.
That's how you measure what you're doing.
Intentions don't matter, goals don't matter, your preferences don't matter.
The only thing that matters is cancer cell count before and after treatment.
Length of remission before and after treatment.
Double blind, all that kind of good stuff, right?
That's the only thing that matters.
It's the only thing that matters.
Everything else is just who gives a shit.
Masturbatory bullshit.
Now, then you have to say, well, okay, so the only measure of whether we're doing good is whether we're harming the interests of evil people.
Preventing them from becoming evil is great, but that's a multi-generational project, but are we harming the interests of any evil people in the moment?
Well, when you see how, and you can see how when the interests of evil people are harmed, I mean, they're all over everyone, right?
They just, they go insane on people.
Even when you harm them as tiny and tangentially as limiting some of their collective bargaining capacities, right?
It's just a way of measuring what it is that you're doing.
One of the ways in measuring your success as a company is do your competitors dislike you?
If they don't even notice you, you have a problem.
It means that you're not threatening any of their market share.
You're not taking away any of their business.
business they don't even have to worry about whether you exist or not.
Anyway, I hope that this...
Makes some kind of sense.
I think we need to be made of sterner stuff.
And I think that we need to recognize that there is a battle, and it's a grim freaking battle that is occurring in the world.
And it is the greatest battle, and it is really the most necessary battle.
And I don't know any other way to...
Change where things are going than to take on this battle.
I really wish it didn't have to be fought.
I really wish that people had laid the foundation and the groundwork for it before, so that we would at least be dealing with some more necessary understandings.
But it hasn't, and so it's up to us, I think.
To make it happen.
To take on the necessary stuff that is going to harm the interests of evil people and slow or stop or reverse the replication of the mindset of immorality that is just so common around us now.
So we'll talk more about this later.
Thank you so much for listening.
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